1 Google Launches Goo.gl, A Bit.ly Competitor

There are plenty of URL shortening service and one that gained a lot of traction is bit.ly.
Google had introduced it’s own URL shortening service late last year – Goo.gl. One of the prominent places you might have seen it in action is in Feedburner Twitter integration. Since then Goo.gl has made it’s way into a lot of Google’s web services but there was no way to use the service directly for your own links.




Now, Google has opened up its service to the public at the address http://goo.gl. You can use Google’s free service for any links on the web.

We don’t intend to overload goo.gl with features, but we do want it to be the stablest, most secure, and fastest URL shortener on the web.
There are many shorteners out there with great features, so some people may wonder whether the world really needs yet another. As we said late last year, we built goo.gl with a focus on quality. With goo.gl, every time you shorten a URL, you know it will work, it will work fast, and it will keep working.

Like Bit.ly, you can see a list of links you have created in the past and also get real time analytics on each link. It will have traffic over time, top referrers, and visitor profiles.
The only downside at the moment is that their is no public API available yet for the app developers can integrate this service. Especially for Twitter desktop and mobile apps. But that’s coming soon.
However, there is already a Firefox extension and Google Chrome extension.
Another cool easter egg in the Goo.gl shortening service is you can get QR code for a link by adding .qr to the end of it. For eg.You can get a QR code for  http://goo.gl/pFqo by typing in http://goo.gl/pFqo.qr.
You can also see the QR code URL by going to link details.
I have liked Bit.ly a lot from the beginning but I hardly go in there to analyze my links and such. But, with me in Google all day it could come in handy to have some integration and one place check it all.

{ via Google Social web }